


Storm Over Europe

by WolfOfAnsbach



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Coffee Shops, F/M, Historical, History, I Don't Even Know, World War I, i literally cannot stop writing interwar period riverdale fanfiction please help me, technically
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 11:36:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12320286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfOfAnsbach/pseuds/WolfOfAnsbach
Summary: Cheryl and Jughead meet in a Prague cafe, early in the 1920s.





	Storm Over Europe

**Author's Note:**

> This was a total stream of consciousness thing sorry if it doesn't make any sense I wrote this in literally thirty minutes.

He is young and far from home. There is a pen in his hand and the seeds of an epic germinating in his mind. He came across the sea, six coins jingling in his ratty pocket, to write and see the world. It is well enough for him that it is being reborn.

“What the hell kind of name is ‘Jughead’?” There is a cabaret show a few hours past dusk. Weedy comedians and half-nude young women. Hashish and coffee dominate the night air. Everyone laughs at political satire that’s less funny than it is painful.

“It’s nice to meet another Yank.” He responds, nipping her antagonism in the bud. He sips his coffee and jots a few notes down into his journal. She’s so _red_.

“Are you going to talk to me?”

“Probably not.” Jughead retreats into his tattered jacket and pulls the decaying newsboy’s cap further down over his face. She bristles in her satin gown and her layers of furs. But the autumn winds strike them about the same in the end. The pen shakes in his hand.

Around them, the words ‘Europe’, ‘Versailles’, ‘revolution’, ‘hope’, and ‘liberty’ flit through the air and thread themselves together into a crude tapestry promising a brilliant future that will never come. Everyone deludes himself.

He puffs on his cigarette. The smoke curls out and for a moment caresses her face. Jughead tears his eyes from his scribblings for a moment. She still hasn’t left. She huffs, her breath frosting in cold Bohemian air, nigh indistinguishable from his cigarette’s emissions. Her lips, already full and red, darken with the chilly evening. Grey clouds mass in the sky.

“What are you doing in this shithole country?” She demands.

He shrugs and imagines the desiccated corpse of a rotten empire. They’re sitting in it. A muddy Hapsburg crown lies in the gutter at their feet. He knocks it aside before she can pick it up.

“Being inspired, I suppose. You?”

She snorts.

“Exploiting. Shattered continent means new opportunities.” She leans in towards him, across the table. “Do you like hotcakes, Jughead?”

Jughead smiles, crooked, and puts down his pen. A few locks of dark hair fall over his sad blue eyes.

“I could never afford them.”

“But you could afford a ticket across the pond?”

“My father was a sailor. I worked my way across. No luxury cruising for me, love.”

She crosses her arms. Her brown eyes flash indignity. The fur lining of her coat swallows up her pale, slender neck.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means you probably paid a lot more and a lot less to get here than I did.”

She leans forward and plucks the cigarette from his mouth. Jughead is so taken aback he can hardly muster the energy to move. His lips hang open, tongue resting gently at the tips of his teeth. She sucks in, cheeks hollowing, and exhausts nearly the entire damn thing in one drag. He prepares to issue forth outrage. He closes his eyes and calms himself.

She eyes him. A little smile animates her full lips. The cigarette-his cigarette-balances nimbly between her middle and index fingers. That’s how _they_ hold their smokes. The other half. His betters. He shakes his head. She waits, unsatisfied, for him to explode in anger.

“I’m used to it.” He mutters. He slides another cigarette from the pocket of his threadbare coat and lights it up. She frowns. He smiles.

“Used to what?”

“Your type taking what’s mine like it’s yours.”

He’s damn hard to rile up and it’s starting to piss her off. She finishes his cigarette and flicks it to the cobblestones, where it dies an ignominious death. The last few embers sparkle and bounce before she grinds the last of its life out with her heel.

“ _Your_ type are a dime a dozen, you know.”

He stops writing again. The point of his pen bleeds through the paper. The ink blots and leeches outward like blood.

“What type is that?”

“The impoverished wandering artist, romantic and misunderstood, dreaming of success. I’ll save you the trouble: you never climb out of the gutter, you die in it.” She stiffens up, haughty and proud. Her nose in the air, lips pursed. The picture of aristocratic arrogance.

He laughs. It’s the first good laugh he’s had in a good while. His face, drawn and pale, has some color restored to it.

“We may be a dime a dozen, but your type is the type spending the dimes. You said it yourself: this entire damn continent’s shattered. Who did that? It sure wasn’t the starving artists. You were the ones pulling the strings.”

She scoffs at that.

“Right. Sorry for singlehandedly starting the war, I suppose.”

“No fur coats for you without a few hundred thousand of us dead. That's how profits work."

“Your type is so sanctimonious, too, I cou-“

“God, just forget about ‘types’. It doesn’t matter right now. We’re all the ‘fucked’ type.”

She laughs.

“You may be. I’m doing just fine for myself.” She fluffs her luxurious ginger hair.

“For now. Trust me, they’ve just sown the seeds for something a hell of a lot worse a few years down the line.”

“Look at that. He’s a pessimist, too. The war to end all wars is…ended. The world is safe for democracy, and I’m about to make a bundle from the resurrection of Europe.”

“I read the fourteen points and I saw a blueprint for the next big war. Wilson’s full of shit.”

“So are Lloyd-George and Clemenceau.”

“They all are.” He smiles, and this time there’s reality to it. She wraps her arms around herself and shivers. The moon is creeping into a lonely Bohemian sky. Mischief waxes and wanes in his eyes. He plucks his cigarette from his mouth, and deaf to her cry of shock, slips it between her lips. “To the lies of nations.”

She raises an eyebrow and smirks.

“You mean the league?”

“Hell no.”

He takes her to bed in the nondescript flat he’s renting from an irate Hungarian for three koruna per week. He digs his fingers into the soft, pale flesh of her hips. She leaves a trail of angry kisses down his collarbone. It’s sad and quiet. Still the warmest and happiest he’s been in years.

Jughead wakes up first, and rolls over to appreciate his bedmate. She lays fast asleep, chest rising and falling. Red hair spills out around her lovely face like a scarlet storm. She’s the daughter of some powerful American industrialist, as it turns out. Quite the catch. He stares up at the ceiling. Outside a truck filled with armed soldiers speeds through the street. Someone shouts something in German.

She wakes up with a start and a gasp, and he assumes a nightmare. He doesn’t ask.

“You’re very beautiful.” He murmurs. It’s not really a compliment. More a stark, unvarnished declaration of fact. It flatters her no more than would the statement: ‘Russia is large’. She sighs.

“Thank you.” She replies, with an enthusiasm matching his. “I’m Cheryl, by the way.

“What would your father think about you stooping to my level?”

Cheryl sneers.

“He doesn’t think about me.”

“Hm. Mine either. Well, dead men don’t think much at all. But even before then…”

“I’m sorry.” Cheryl says, in that voice that implies she really doesn’t care all that much. He doesn’t blame her. She pauses for a moment. “My brother’s dead.” She finally offers, voice cracking.

“I’m sorry. If it makes you feel any better, ask me and everyone still around after the war is deader than everyone who died in it.”

“What the fuck’s that supposed to mean?”

He chuckles.

“Just the sophistic ramblings of a starving artist.”

They get breakfast together, at the same German café where they met. He picks away at his food, sneaking looks at the newspaper. He can read German marginally better than he can read Czech, thankfully. Then again, he can’t read Czech.

“Are these eggs made out of rubber?” Cheryl snaps.

“The Bolsheviks are in Warsaw.” Jughead sighs.

“Who cares? Let ‘em rule the world.”

A waiter missing an arm with a thin handlebar mustache arrives to attend them.

“Anything needed? Madame? Sir?”

“Yeah, I’d like to have your chef put up in front of a firing squad.” Cheryl spits. The waiter starts. He laughs. He shows her his book. It’s not really about anything, in the sense of an opening and a plot and a climax. Not yet, anyway. The bare bones are there. It’s about loss. About confused youth, wandering a shattered world. Realizing you can’t really make ploughshares out of swords. Slowly, it becomes about them. “It’s not bad.” She says. And he hardly knows her, but he can tell that’s a high complement from her lips.

They go to bed again that night. She’s gentler this time. Her skin is hot and soft against his and he notices the tear droplets shining in her eyes. He wipes them away for her and kisses her gently, until he realizes he can’t tell their tears apart anymore.

The next morning Cheryl is gone, and there’s a stack of a few hundred American dollar bills decorating the nightstand in his ugly little flat. He can strike the ‘starving’ from his title, at least.

She goes home, maybe. To be pampered and waited upon and to live a life of ease. Or maybe she doesn’t. Maybe Cheryl collects some valuables and disappears into the sands of Palestine or the _sierras_ of Mexico. Maybe he touched a cord in her.

As for Jughead, the roads of the world lay wide open. East, west, north, south. There are glens and forests and rivers. A myriad of subjects for his tales. He starts back on his journey, leaving cold Bohemia behind him. He hears the guns and the cannons long before everyone else.

He never finishes his book.

They are lost together in the story of a shattered century.


End file.
